Saul David - Prince of Pleasure: The Prince of Wales and the Making of the Regency

PRINCE OF PLEASURE

The Prince of Wales and the Making of the Regency

Saul David

Saul David 1998

Saul David has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published 1998 by Little, Brown and Company.

This edition published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2014.

Table of Contents

For Cathy

Prologue

The infamous first meeting between the betrothed cousins, George, Prince of Wales, and Princess Caroline of Brunswick, took place in St Jamess Palace on 5 April 1795. She had just arrived by carriage from Greenwich, having been met off the Royal yacht Augusta by her new lady-in-waiting, Lady Jersey, who also happened to be the Princes mistress. He had come directly from his extravagant Pall Mall mansion, Carlton House.

As the handsome but flabby Prince entered the room, his bride-to-be fair-haired and pretty, yet short and with a head too large for her body attempted to kneel. He raised her (gracefully enough), recorded Lord Malmesbury, the only witness, and embraced her, said barely one word, turned round [and] returned to a distant part of the apartment.

Calling Malmesbury to him, he said, Harris, I am not well; pray get me a glass of brandy.

`Sir, replied an embarrassed Malmesbury, had you not better have a glass of water?

No , said the Prince with an oath, I will go directly to the Queen. And away he went without uttering another word.

The Princess was astonished. My God! she said in French (her English would never be perfect). Does the Prince always act like this? I think hes very fat, and hes nothing like as handsome as his portrait.

Malmesbury replied that the Prince was naturally a good deal affected and flurried at this first interview, but she would certainly find him different at dinner. And so she did but it was too late.

The Princes ungallant reception of his young fiance at 26, she was six years his junior was largely due to her exceptionally low standards of personal hygiene. Malmesbury had noticed these deficiencies during the long journey from Brunswick, and had felt it necessary to advise her that the Prince was very delicate and expected a long and very careful toilette de propret which meant, at the very least, washing herself well all over . But this sound advice had made only a temporary impression and she had since returned to her old ways: wearing coarse petticoats and shifts, thread stockings, and these never well washed, or changed often enough. When the fastidious Prince met her for the first time, her pungent body odour was unmistakable.

It did not help that her good looks were offset by a short, stocky physique whereas the Prince preferred tall, stout women. Or that he was already married (albeit secretly) and had only agreed to a second, official ceremony as a means of reducing his ruinous debts. The final straw came during the farcical wedding night when the Prince discovered that his new wife was not a virgin (there was no appearance of blood, he later told Malmesbury, and her manners were not those of a novice). He managed to make love to her just three times twice that night and once the next before his repulsion got the better of his sense of duty. A daughter, Charlotte, was conceived in the process; but she died 21 years later in childbirth, leaving him without an heir. Seven years after his death, the daughter of his younger brother, the Duke of Kent, succeeded to the throne as Queen Victoria. Two more contrasting monarchs would be hard to imagine.

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The enduring image of George IV is that of Prinny, the overweight, overdressed and oversexed buffoon waiting for his periodically deranged father to be declared unfit to rule. This was how he was portrayed in contemporary prints and, more recently, in the TV series Blackadder and the film The Madness of King George . But like many popular images, it ignores the more serious side of his character. Given his predilection for pleasure, it is probably no coincidence that his lasting achievements were nearly all cultural. The Regency in its widest sense (1800-1830) is remembered today as a devil-may-care period of low morals and high fashion. It was also, thanks to his patronage, a time of great cultural fertility. Probably no monarch in British history has had a more positive influence on so many areas of culture: fine art, sculpture, architecture, literature, music and even science.

The prediction made by his preceptor, the Bishop of Coventry, in 1777 that his young charge might develop into a combination of the most polished gentleman and the most accomplished blackguard in Europe proved to be remarkably accurate.

1 - A Dissipated Youth

Queen Charlotte of England was just 18, and had been married less than a year, when she fulfilled her dynastic obligations by giving birth to as strong, large and pretty boy... as ever was seen at St Jamess Palace in the early evening of 12 August 1762.

Waiting anxiously in his private apartments, King George III was informed by a breathless Earl of Huntingdon, his bungling Groom of the Stole, that he was the father of a baby girl. The error was doubly unfortunate in that the 24-year-old King had promised 1,000 to the bearer of news that he had a son, but only 500 if it was a daughter. More concerned with his young wifes health than the sex of the child, however, the King hurried to the Queens bedchamber to hear the glad tidings that both mother and son the sex of which was no longer in doubt were alive and well. The lusty infant was then taken into the ante-room and shown to an excited gathering of royal dukes, government ministers, senior peers, bishops and foreign ambassadors.

No heir had been born to a ruling monarch, for almost 75 years since the Old Pretender, James IIs son, in 1688 and all was joy, merriment, and gladness in London. A procession of immense riches taken in a Spanish galleon, going past St Jamess Palace on its way to the Bank of England, gave cause for double celebration.

A month later, with every circumstance of splendour, the young Prince was baptised George Augustus Frederick by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Queens drawing-room. He had already been created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester and, by right of birth, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick and Baron of Renfrew.

*

In 1762, the year of the Princes birth, Britain was still on the verge of the great social and economic upheaval that came to be known as the Industrial Revolution. The population of England and Wales was steady at 6.5 million, thanks to the rate of births and deaths being similarly high. But as improvements in agriculture and medicine began to take effect and people were better fed, better clothed and less likely to catch diseases like smallpox the death rate plummeted and the population exploded, particularly after 1800. By 1831, the year after George IVs death, it had risen to 16.5 million, with urban areas the principal beneficiaries.

In 1760, however, when George III first came to the throne, the majority of Britons still lived in rural communities. Only two English cities had populations greater than 50,000: London with 750,000, and Bristol with 60,000. The rest were essentially small market towns and little ports.

Trade was the lifeblood of the nation. In 1760, at a time when total government expenditure was just 15.5 million (and that during a war year of exceptional cost), imports were worth 11 million and exports 16 million. The main imports were consumables such as wines, spirits, sugar, tea and coffee. Exports were largely textiles (woollen goods making up a quarter of the total trade), metal goods, tin, pottery and cured fish. One of the most profitable areas of trade was the Atlantic triangle. Merchants would transport manufactured goods to West Africa and exchange them for slaves who, in turn, would be taken to the West Indies and the southern colonies of North America. Sugar, tobacco and timber would be brought back to Britain.